


trade the hollow in my chest for all the salt in the sea

by eneiryu



Series: waves on the ocean for the wavering kind [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, post-traumatic stress symptoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:08:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25531102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: You leave Beacon Hills with exactly the same things you came into it with: your truck, a duffel bag full of clothes, and the permanent taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth.
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: waves on the ocean for the wavering kind [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2082588
Comments: 84
Kudos: 205





	trade the hollow in my chest for all the salt in the sea

**Author's Note:**

> Theo suffers from a disorder here that I want to warn for, just in case. See the end note for details.

You leave the hospital after Gabe dies.

\---

You’re not—that’s not dramatics. It’s a statement of _fact_. Gabe dies and you release his arm, the black veins not yet faded from your own, and behind you, you can hear Liam and Corey and Mason and Nolan and Ms. McCall all alive and breathing, but more importantly, several floors away you can hear the Sheriff. _You’re arresting us? Why?_ You had asked him a few days and several lifetimes ago, and the Sheriff had answered: _for murder_. At the time he’d meant the dead hunters but once the adrenaline wears off he’s going to mean someone— _someones_ —else, and you—know better than to push your luck.

So you leave.

It’s not difficult. Even with the fight over the hospital is still chaotic, and even if Liam or Ms. McCall or the Sheriff or _whoever_ wanted to keep track of you, there’s too much going on. And you know how to slip through those cracks. Your whole _life_ has been slipping through those cracks, and so you slip right through the one that opens up when the Sheriff’s and Agent McCall’s and Parrish’s sweep of the hospital finally spills them out onto the floor where Liam and the others are. Ms. McCall jumps and shrieks and nearly brains her ex-husband with her ridiculous stun baton, and the resulting confusion is all you need; you’re in the staircase and several floors down within half a minute.

You pry open the case from your phone and pull the battery out before you pull out of the hospital. You swap your old license plates with a new set from an identical truck in the parking lot of the first megastore you come across. You avoid the interstate highways, with their automated tolling systems and associated cameras.

You leave.

\---

Knowing Monroe is still alive somewhere is a piece of knowledge that sits heavy in your mind.

You doubt you’re going to be much of a target; you refuse to give yourself that much credit. For all Monroe’s bluster and claim to a higher purpose, her ego has always been one of her primary motivating factors, and that means that Scott and the rest of the McCall pack are going to be—going to _remain_ , really—her focus.

That doesn’t mean she won’t kill you if she comes across you, though. Lone wolves, and all that.

The problem is, you don’t have any _money_. You don’t have much of anything else, either—your truck, a duffel bag full of clothes, the permanent taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth—but the most immediate problem is the money. You hadn’t come to Beacon Hills with any and so you hadn’t _left_ with any, and it, unfortunately, limits your options. Your truck can’t get far, after all, on the quarter tank of gas you’d had left when you’d fled, and you obviously need to _eat_.

That last one you can solve without much issue, at least. You’re a sizable-enough wolf when you shift fully that you can take down a good-sized deer, when you can actually _find_ one, and you’re more than capable of snapping up rabbits and squirrels when you can’t.

You hate doing it, though. It makes you feel too exactly like the animal Monroe had claimed you and every other supernatural to be.

But if your choices are to starve or to give in to everyone’s worst expectations of you, well.

You’ve been doing that all your life already.

\---

The money thing you end up figuring out how to solve without much issue, too. Turns out, you’re as good a thief as you are—whatever you’d already been.

It takes you a half a day to figure out pickpocketing, wandering around the sorry excuse for a downtown of the latest city you’d managed to stumble into, your hands fumbling at first but more and more certain as the hours roll on. It helps that you’re young, and it helps that you’re _pretty_ ; when you knock into the shoulders and sides of men and women, older and younger, well-dressed or not, and smile shakily and stammer your way through apologies for the inconvenience, they’re too busy staring at the bitten-red of your lips and the suggestion of your biceps under your shirt to notice you subtly pulling your hand back from their jackets, or purses, or pants.

You steal enough to get a motel room that night. You shower, _scrubbing_ yourself clean of sweat and dirt and the strange uncertain way your skin settles on your bones; you’d never full-shifted back and forth this much. It leaves you expecting the rough bristle of fur where you feel fragile human skin, and breathing in strange unsteady gasps, because the shape of your _lungs_ is different; filling up your rib cage in all the wrong ways.

You start out in the bed that night, but by morning you’re back to sleeping in your truck; in the dark of the night the walls of the motel room had seemed cavernously large, and far apart.

It’s strange, you think, that you’d never imagined that you’d _retreat_ to a cage.

It’s strange, but you’ve found that you’d never imagined a lot of things.

\---

You used to drink your coffee with just enough sugar in it to take the edge of bitterness off. Now you take it as black as possible, from the worst possible locations you can find; run-down gas stations and sketchy truck stop diners and any place where it’s going to be as few steps up from _tar_ as you can get.

It’s the only thing that covers up, even temporarily, the taste of grave dirt and your own blood in your mouth.

The Doctors would have called it _phantogeusia_. Phantom taste syndrome. In your more delirious moments, tucked up in the corner of some cracking vinyl booth and letting _aggression_ spill from you in waves every time some trucker slows to eye you speculatively, you find yourself thinking that the taste in your mouth is probably less _phantom_ than most.

You’d thought…

After you’d clawed your way out of the grave dirt of the skinwalker’s prison— _after Liam freed you_ , your traitorous mind thinks, but you shove it away—you’d thought that the taste had just been that. Had literally been that you’d gotten grave dirt in your mouth on the way through it.

And you _had_. Several times when Liam and Hayden and Mr. Douglas-the-lowenmensch-Nazi hadn’t been looking after you’d first come back, you’d had to lean over and spit, trying to clear your tongue and teeth of mud and grit. But that had only been for a few hours; a few hours until Liam had talked Scott into keeping you top-side, and Scott had begrudgingly offered you one of the McCall house showers. Then you’d been able to rinse your mouth out, over and over again, until your gums had _bled_.

Then you’d realized, with a growing sense of horror, that the sickening taste on your tongue hadn’t just been physical.

There’d been about fifty different times when you’d nearly told Liam. You’d never even _dreamed_ of telling the others, but _Liam_ … There’d been whole _minutes_ when he wouldn’t stop looking at you, whole _days_ , his brow furrowed and the line of his mouth tight, like there was something about you he was trying to puzzle out.

And so you’d nearly said, _do you remember all those times you’d get planted into the dirt when you were younger, or in lacrosse practice, or when you were fighting for your life?_ You’d nearly said _, do you remember how your mouth tasted after the Berserkers, or that time your entire team turned on you, or I manipulated you into trying to kill Scott?_

You’d nearly said, _that’s how my mouth tastes all the time, now._

You’d nearly said, _I thought I’d get used to it but I haven’t._

You’d nearly said, _sometimes, when it’s dark and I’m alone in my truck and I haven’t slept in days because I can’t breathe past the taste, I think of asking you if you still have the pieces of Kira’s sword._

You hadn’t said any of it, though; it’d seemed unnecessarily cruel.

And you?

You’ve lost your ability to be unnecessarily cruel to Liam.

\---

Eventually you wind up on the coast.

Not of _California_ , that still seems too tempting-fate close to Beacon Hills, but of _Washington_. It’d been instinct more than intent, a hazed half-awake sort of wandering, but the first time you step foot onto the rocky, pebble-lined shore of the beach, you immediately understand _why_.

The sharp bite of the sea-salt in the air covers, for the space of whole breaths at a time, the taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth.

It _scours_ your throat and lungs clean, or at least it _feels_ that way, and you spend the rest of the day on the beach just breathing in it. It’s fucking _freezing_ —it’s still fall, and heading into winter—but you _don’t care_ : for whole minutes at a time you can forget about the skinwalkers and their prison and Liam-who-pulled-you-out-of-it and Josh and Tracy and the Doctors and the _why_ of why you’d been inside the prison in the first place.

It always comes back, though.

Just like you, apparently.

\---

But it becomes an addiction, of sorts. It means you can’t pull yourself away from the sea.

That winds up working out, though. One morning after you’ve spent the previous hours as a wolf, snapping up the little long-beaked birds that scurry along the beach, you start walking along the shore, hands in your pockets and shoes left in your truck, and you keep walking until you can’t, anymore, because you run right into a barbed-wire-topped fence.

You look up, and up, and then _keep_ looking up, because the stacks of metal shipping crates are stacked _that high_ ; gleaming dully in the bare sunlight managing to break through the clouds. Across the way you can hear the sheer wall of _noise_ —people yelling and ships creaking and equipment groaning—of the port in action, and you stand at the edge of the fence and think, and think.

A few hours later you’re back, dressed in what could arguably be considered the best of your meager collection of clothes, and slipping through the security lining the port in the chaos of its normal operation. You spend a while wandering around, listening, and then you find what you’re looking for.

 _Who_ you’re looking for.

“You’re shittin’ me,” the man you eventually approach says. He’s big, and brawny, and even his scuffed hard hat and ragged reflective vest _reek_ of cigarette smoke. “You’re like, twelve.”

You just grin. There’s a crate next to you, filled with pallets of metal-packed food destined for some supermarket somewhere; somewhere that could even be _Beacon Hills_. Reaching over, you hook your fingers under the edge of the crate’s lid—the wood still nailed shut—and lift.

The crate rocks up onto its edge.

“Payment’s all in cash,” the big man eventually tells you, once he’s managed to wipe the absolutely _stunned_ look off his face. “And if immigration, or—” he gives you a long, considering look, “—Social Services come looking for you, I’m not covering for you.”

“No one’s going to come looking,” you tell him.

It might even be true.

\---

The dock job eventually lets you save up enough money that you can rent an apartment in a rundown section of town.

The complex is barely on the habitable side of filthy and half the appliances don’t work, but the landlord accepts your handful of cash without comment, and that’s really all you need. But you do install extra locks on the front door.

You’re not _that_ much of an idiot.

Still, you find that you have to train yourself into staying in the apartment, rather than your truck. As cramped as the dank space is it still feels too _large_ , but as hard-to-breathe as staying inside it sometimes _is_ , you’re still sick of sleeping curled up in your truck, waiting for the inevitable _tap-tap-tap_.

So you force yourself, for one hour at a time, then two, then three, to stay inside it, no matter how fast, or shallow, your breathing becomes. No matter how many times you put your claws through the wood of the floors, or the dingy mattress you’d found on a street corner, or your own skin, at every creak and groan and sudden shrieking yell from one of the other tenants, the walls thin, thin, thin. You’ll let yourself press yourself into a corner, arms around your knees and your face—your eyes glowing gold—hidden against your thighs, but you won’t let yourself _leave_.

The first night that you actually manage to last from dusk until dawn, you’re so relieved—and so exhausted from the tense way you’d held yourself throughout the hours—that you pass out for real just as the bedroom is filling up with sunlight from the window.

You miss your shift at the dock. The foreman with his hard hat and his reflective vest still reeking of cigarette smoke threatens to fire you if it happens again.

You just smirk, feeling more like yourself than you have in _weeks_. You miss another day that week, just because you can.

He doesn’t fire you.

\---

You don’t have a computer, but you get a cheap phone, eventually; the kind that you fill up with minutes and data purchased through little cards at the gas station.

You leave it off, most times, though you always carry it with you. When you’re at your apartment, you leave it tossed into a drawer with your old phone; the one who’s back you’d pried loose when you’d fled Beacon Hills.

Sometimes when you reach for your new phone, you accidentally grab the old.

Sometimes you’ll spend whole minutes staring down at it, before you throw it back into the drawer, and slam it closed again.

\---

You don’t pay much attention to the news but it’s sometimes hard to avoid, because the diner where you go on mornings when you don’t have a shift has a tiny TV tucked into a corner of the restaurant behind the bar, and you can hear it no matter where you sit.

The waitress who’s there most mornings keeps it tuned to a local news station, and she’s actually diligent about watching it; in between getting you refills of caustic black coffee, she’ll stand at the corner of the bar and stare up at it, expression fixed.

You find yourself watching her more often than the news, because you can’t stop _that part_ of your brain from wondering, and wondering, and wondering: _what happened to you?_ A death. A murder. An unexplained disappearance. Something that had left a mark and given the woman an appreciation for the tragedies that occur on the small-scale rather than the large; something she still carries with her.

You work your jaw, when you think that, the taste of blood-and-grave-dirt so very permanent in your mouth.

But that’s the reason that you catch the news report when you do. An unexplained disappearance that had become a death, suspected of being a murder. In the picture on the screen the victim looks young, and happy, and smiling.

There’s just enough reflection around his eyes that you realize immediately: _werewolf_.

You leave the diner immediately after. You don’t want to know.

\---

The problem is you _do_ know. The problem is you _keep_ knowing.

It’s how your brain works. It’s how your brain was made, modified, _molded_ by the Doctors. You may not be as strong as werewolves or as fast as coyotes or as uniquely gifted as the rest of the chimeras, but what you _are_ , is smart.

It’s not arrogance. It’s the _truth_.

You see the news report and your brain starts to work. _A dead werewolf_. It could be a one-off, a mundane spat. Something almost _human_ in its banalness. Back at the docks you load, and unload, and load, and unload.

But in the office when you pick up your pay, the smoke-reeking foreman has a newspaper open on his desk, coffee rings here and there around the print. _Another unexplained disappearance_ , one of the headlines blares. The woman smiling in the photo with her friends has her eyes carefully turned away; not enough to be obvious, but enough to keep the lens-flare from showing, to someone who knows how to look.

You know how to look.

You can’t _stop_ yourself from looking.

That night in your apartment, sat on your mattress laid out on the floor, you take your new phone and use up some of your precious data trawling through local news sites, crime reports, obituaries. You don’t write anything down, but you don’t need to.

Your brain—the Doctors’ brain—goes _click, click, click_.

\---

There was a reason you hadn’t just destroyed your old phone, and that reason hadn’t been sentiment.

The next day that you don’t have a shift, you get in your truck and you drive, taking the route you’d already identified that’s free of cameras, of tolls, of much of anything at all. You drive and drive and _drive_ , and only once you’re in the middle of nowhere do you take out an even _newer_ phone and break it free of its hard-shell plastic packaging.

You leave it on the passenger seat next to you. You take your old phone—your _Beacon Hills_ phone—and set the battery back inside its case.

The screen lights up with dozens of missed calls, even more missed text messages. You scroll through them _fast_ because time is of the essence, and are satisfied, to some extent, when you see they’re all from _weeks_ ago. Or most of them are, anyway; you frown.

But time is of the essence.

You look up Argent’s number. You punch it into a blank text message on your newest burner phone.

You give him all the details you dare.

The whole undertaking takes less than two minutes. You rip the battery back out of your Beacon Hills phone and drop it next to the now-dark screen. You take the burner phone and step out of your truck, and place the cheap plastic device under your front wheel.

You drive away.

\---

The problem with the sea-salt air, and underneath it the blood-and-grave-dirt taste you use it to cover up, is that it burns out your sense of smell.

You get back from the docks a few days after your detour with your phones, sweaty and filthy and exhausted and unable to smell much of anything, really, but the caustic scrape of polluted air over your raw throat, and the second you step through your door, you find yourself spun around, and pinned face-first against it. There’s a gun digging into your lower back, right below your kidney.

“Hey, Theo,” Argent says, and you _freeze_.

Argent’s waiting for you to reply. He’s certainly waiting for you to _fight_ , and he seems confused when, after half a minute, a minute, nearly two, you do neither. The muzzle of the gun digging hard into your back retreats, some. Argent’s forearm braced across your shoulders lightens.

You just put your forehead against the wood of the door, and squeeze your eyes shut, and wait.

In this apartment complex a gunshot won’t even _register_. You wonder if Argent will tell Scott, or the Sheriff, or any of the others, or if he’ll simply let your disappearance become permanent; irrevocable; final.

You bet he’ll pick the latter. Argent knows just as much as you do about winning battles by not fighting them.

But the gunshot never comes. Instead, after another crawling minute of silence, Argent pulls fully back. You still can’t really smell him but you can hear him moving step by careful step back, until he’s moved back almost as far as he can, his back nearly against the opposite wall. You hesitate, and then you turn. You leave your shoulders against the door.

You stare at each other.

Argent still thinks you’re playing some kind of game. The suspicion is all over his face. But after another few beats he dips one hand into his pocket—his other left on his gun, pointed directly between your eyes—and pulls out his phone. He wiggles it a little.

“Your information was good,” he tells you. “The missing pieces we needed, in fact, to pick up Monroe’s trail again.”

 _They’d lost it_ , your brain—the Doctors’ brain—clicks. _They hadn’t been able to find it again_. You say nothing.

Argent keeps studying you, his eyes narrowing. He glances to his left, his gun never wavering. The empty living area with its ash-and-whatever-else stained carpet. The kitchen with its counters full of gauges and burns from careless knives and hot pans and meals. He glances to his right, down the hallway towards the bedroom. The corner of your bare mattress must just be visible, covered in the collection of ragged blankets you’d dragged in from your truck.

“I can see why you ran,” he finally says. His mouth curls up in a sharp smile that’s more _sharp_ than smile. “Living like a king, I see.”

“Better than a cell,” you retort, because that’d become your mantra: _better than a cell, better than a cell, better than a_ —

“Is it?” Argent wonders.

He holsters his gun.

\---

You take him to the diner, eventually, with the TV set high up in the corner of the bar.

You hadn’t wanted to but you were still too sweaty and filthy and exhausted and with your sense of smell still too burned out to think of anywhere else, and when Argent had said, _I’ve been driving all day_ , it’d been an order, and not a request.

It’d also been a lie; Argent is a hunter, a tracker, a _killer_. He’d been here for days, almost certainly, watching and waiting and _observing_.

He does the same sitting across from you in the booth in the diner.

He also orders for you. Eggs, bacon, sausage. A massive side of hash browns that he sits and watches you eat, his eyes fixed on your face. At first you try and stay sitting up straight, but as time wears on you start to hunch more and more in, because you know what he’s seeing. The gauntness of your face, the way your clothes hang loose on your no-longer-quite-so-muscular frame.

But you don’t tell him that the eggs and hash browns taste chalky; gritty; like dirt. You force yourself not to gag at the way the bacon and sausage make the taste of iron, and copper, explode in your mouth, cloying and all-consuming.

You just wash it all down with black coffee, as few steps up from _tar_ as you’ve been able to get.

“Why’d you send me that information?” Argent asks, eventually, after the waitress with the small-scale tragedy writ permanently across her bones clears your plates; she keeps shooting you these looks, a concerned sort of curious and her eyes hard on Argent’s face.

You think about lying. You say: “I don’t know.”

Argent’s usually calm and cool and still like a hunter; like a _predator_. And he’s not exactly _not_ that, but he has one hand on the scuffed linoleum of the table, and one finger going _tap-tap-tap_ against the edge. You wonder what he’s debating.

You wonder if you care.

But finally he dips his tapping hand back down, below the table. You have an absurd flash of panic that he’s going for his gun, but Argent’s not that stupid; he isn’t going to kill you in front of a diner full of witnesses. Still, you don’t relax even when he brings his hand back up, clutching a cheap plastic phone almost exactly like the one you’d used to text him. He sets it on the table between you.

“I can find you again,” he tells you.

Your eyes flick up to his from the phone. You say nothing.

“I _will_ find you again, if you try to run,” he says, solemn like a promise.

“Unless?” You croak, because you recognize the offered cue.

“You keep that on you at all times,” he answers. “You answer when I call, or text, or email. You help,” he says, “find Monroe.”

You don’t answer right away. When Argent had said _I will find you again, if you try to run_ , he hadn’t said what would happen _then_ , but he hadn’t needed to. Earlier in your apartment with his gun pressed to your back, that’d been your one reprieve; that’d been the only second— _third_ —chance you’re going to get.

You wonder, again, if you care.

But.

“The others don’t find out,” you bargain, your eyes flicking finally back up to Argent’s. “Scott, and Stiles, and the Sheriff, and—” _Liam_ “—the others, they don’t find out.”

Argent doesn’t agree, or hold his hand out to shake. He just takes his fingers, and flicks them fast and hard in front of the phone. It rockets towards you. You catch it.

You pick it up.

\---

Argent sends you regular, and enough, information, that eventually you give in and buy a cheap used laptop.

You still don’t have Internet at your apartment—couldn’t afford it even if you _did_ feel like risking it—and so you end up spending more and more of your free time at a coffee shop in the city’s sorry excuse for a downtown, wedged into a corner in an armchair with your laptop balanced on your knees. The coffee itself is too weak to cover up the blood-and-grave-dirt taste in your mouth, but you find that if you order the overpriced, overspiced, over _done_ daily latte special, the cloying sugar and overwhelming cacophony of flavors nearly does, and there’s a regular barista—young, pretty, prone to lightly flushed cheeks—that’ll give you free refills, even though you never ask.

The first time it happens you nearly leave immediately. Even after you make the decision—your claws in your thigh hidden by the arm of the chair—to stay, you nearly never come _back_ , something too unsettled and too jittery and too _panicked_ at the small shy smile the barista had given you as they’d set the new mug down, and cleared your old.

But you’d gone back. But the smell of their warm easy benign interest had almost been better for briefly covering up the taste in your mouth than the coffee.

It makes an odd contrast to the clinical brutality of the information Argent gives you, and it makes it hard to read. There’s a part of you that’s shocked that this shocks you, uncomfortable that this makes you uncomfortable; you remember standing over Donovan Donati strapped down and with all of his teeth freshly pulled, smirking and sniggering and _savoring_.

You drink more coffee. You gag—hidden and subtle and _practiced_ , now—behind the lip of the mug.

Monroe’s trying to move between the hunter clans, the Calaveras to the south and the Thurows to the North. You pull Argent’s phone from your pocket, and tell him so.

\---

The port doesn’t sleep for the winter holidays, and neither do you.

The foreman asks vague guilty questions about your plans for the cold stretch of weeks—every now and then when he looks at you he gets this expression on his face like he’s remembering how young you are, which is why, you think, he does his best not to look at you at all—and you shrug and demur and never actually give him an answer. He has enough of his regulars—his _legal_ workers—asking for time off that he’s grateful for the availability of your hands and shoulders and your supernatural stamina, even if he doesn’t know enough—won’t _ever_ know enough—to name it for what it is.

You work until you’re too tired to think. You go to the beach, on the other side of the barbed-wire-topped fence, and curl up in your full-shift form for whole nights at a time, until when you get back to your apartment you have to spend a full half-hour under the lukewarm spray of the shower, trying to scrub sea-salt off your skin.

Argent’s emails and texts and calls keep rolling in no matter which set of decorations go up downtown. At first you wonder if it’s because he doesn’t notice, or care—Monroe wouldn’t necessarily take a holiday, and Argent’s too much of a consummate hunter to rest when his prey isn’t doing the same—but then you realize, with all the certainty of gospel:

It’s a gift.

 _Living like a king, I see,_ Argent had said, the first time he’d seen your accommodations. His smile had been sharp but there’d been something considering in his eyes, and when you’d said _better than a cell_ —trying to convince him, or yourself, or both—he’d wondered: _is it?_

The information keeps you busy through the slide of time made strange and surreal by the holidays, and the way the people and town reshape themselves to match.

 _Happy Holidays_ , you think to yourself when Argent’s newest email comes in, and it’s not a bitter thought.

\---

Argent only comes to see you rarely.

At first you think the visits are pragmatic in nature, a trust-but-verify element added to the weight of the phone he’d given you that you do, in fact, keep on you at all times. But the third or fourth time it happens, and the third or fourth time he forces you to the diner, or a little hole-in-the-wall Peruvian place, or the little stand near the gas station by the highway that sells still-steaming _pelmeni_ , you realize it’s more a wellness-check. He’s literally checking to make sure you haven’t let yourself starve to death.

His concern isn’t sentimental. If it wasn’t for the fact that you’ve proven yourself useful he’d probably be relieved if you died; there’s enough of his mistakes still up and wandering around that having one less potentially catastrophic wildcard in the deck would let him sleep easier.

But you _have_ proven yourself useful, and so every few weeks he shows up, and he makes you eat.

You wonder what will happen after he finds Monroe. You nearly ask, but.

But you know what you’re hoping for. You don’t want to know if you’re wrong.

\---

The thing that you hadn’t anticipated, and absolutely _should have_ , is Liam managing to once again surprise you.

Back when you’d first been picking him apart, figuring out what made him tick—the necessary lynchpin of your whole plan—he’d been interesting but not intriguing. Curious but not absorbing. He was going to have to kill Scott and you were going to have to kill him, and so whatever strange quirks or flashes of character he’d shown, it didn’t matter; he was temporary; a tool; a corpse that didn’t know it was dead yet.

But over and over again he’d sidestepped all your carefully-laid plans. In the library with Scott when he’d managed to anchor himself to Mason’s distressed yells and pull himself back from the riptide of the Supermoon. In the sewers with Kira’s sword in his hands and _you’re my responsibility, now_ on his lips.

Slamming up against the closing elevator doors at the hospital with you standing on the other side, his frantic _no!_ ringing and ringing and ringing as you’d stared down a hallway full of Ghost Riders.

At the abandoned zoo, with _Mykonos, Mykonos, Mykonos_ echoing around the concrete labyrinth around you.

In the elevator with that look in his eye, _I will fight with you_.

And now, in your ratty apartment, your sense of smell burned out by the sea-salt air and the blood-and-grave-dirt taste permanently in your mouth, the wood of your front door splintered where he’d apparently broken through all your locks.

You stand in the doorway. You stare at him.

“Hey, Theo,” he says, and his eyes are gold.

\---

He breaks your nose. As greetings go, it’s entirely on-brand.

Less on-brand: your reaction to it.

The taste of blood in your mouth going from phantom to all-too-real is apparently too much for you to take. You wind up hunched over the kitchen sink as the closest option, not at all confident in your ability to reach the bathroom as you almost instantly start vomiting up the mouthfuls of blood that manage to run down your throat before your nose finishes healing.

Liam stands, and stares, eyes wide and knuckles of his upraised hand still bloody. If he smells like surprise or guilt or anything else you can’t tell; everything is _iron, copper, iron_. You vomit up more blood.

His fingers on the back of your neck come as enough of a surprise that you jolt and nearly trip over your tangled feet, and it’s only Liam wrapping his hands around your shoulders and hauling you back upright—back over the sink—that prevents you from falling over. You manage to turn your head just enough to look at him, and when he looks back his expression is unreadable.

Something twists in your chest. Liam’s expression has _never_ been unreadable, at least not to you. It’s always been too perfect a match—a mirror—for his heart bleeding away on his sleeve.

The sight of it is almost worse than the taste of blood in your mouth.

Almost.

\---

In the end, the only reason you’re able to recover is because Liam puts his fingers back on the back of your neck, and siphons your nausea.

You nearly sob with relief when he does it. The only reason you _don’t_ is because you’re too surprised, the sound of it caught in your vice-tight throat. But as Liam pulls the nausea away from your blood and flesh and bones and into his own, its sudden ringing absence in your skull makes you realize that it’s _been there_ , every minute of every day, in greater or lesser quantities, since—

Since Liam pulled you out of the skinwalker prison.

His fingers on the back of your neck tighten like anchors. He pulls again; he pulls you upright.

He also gets you wedged back in the corner of two perpendicular sections of counter. He must not be confident of your ability to stay upright unassisted because he presses in after you, his hips against your hips to pin you to the cheap fake granite, the sharp edges of it digging into your lower back. You barely notice either the sting of it or the pressure of Liam’s hips, still too blank-minded from the sudden bedrock _absence_ of the nausea you didn’t even know you’d learned to breathe around.

It gives Liam the time to find one of the two scratched-up plastic cups you’d stolen from the diner in one of your cabinets, and then lean back over the sink—still blood-spattered—to fill it up with water. The kitchen's small enough that he can do it all without moving from his position pinning you upright against the counter, his hips still firmly against yours.

You take the water when he hands it to you. You rinse out your mouth, and only then does he move back, barely more than a few inches, to give you the room to lean out of the corner he’d wedged you into, and spit over the sink.

It takes several glasses for the taste of blood in your mouth to go from real back to phantom; for the taste of grave dirt to rise back alongside it, no longer overwhelmed. You close your eyes, a horrible half-reluctant sort of _relieved_ , and sag a little more against the counter still digging into your back.

Your face and neck and the top of your shirt are still covered in blood. The smell of it is still enough to set off an empty hollow feeling in your stomach; the place where nausea would be, if Liam hadn’t pulled it away from you. Liam is still standing close enough to you that you can feel his heat, the twitching of his thigh against yours. He has his feet planted. He’s not planning on moving.

You swallow a sigh, and dip the bottom of your ruined shirt into your latest glass of refilled water. You start scrubbing your face and neck clean, best you can.

Liam just watches, his face close enough to yours that his breath skates over the damp skin of your lips, your cheeks, your neck; you shiver. You can’t help it.

When you’ve finally cleaned off as much of the blood from your face as your imperfect senses can detect, you drop your now-wet shirt back down. The touch of the wet cloth against your stomach makes the muscles there tighten, and judder, and Liam presses forward in a reflexive reaction; still looking to pin you. Still looking to keep you still.

You look at him, waiting. “You missed a spot,” he finally says, and before you can gather your surprised-scattered thoughts back together to respond, he’s sliding his own sleeve down over the heel of his palm, and lifting it to rub at the dip between the two ridges of either side of your lips, just under your nose. The scrape of his shirt over your skin is surprisingly gentle.

“There,” he says, when he’s apparently satisfied.

He still doesn’t move back.

\---

“Don’t you want to ask me how I found you?” He eventually wonders. It’s barbed; pointed. You’re still standing very close.

But: “I don’t need to ask,” you reply quietly, because you _don’t_.

Argent had never actually _agreed_ not to tell Scott and Stiles and the Sheriff and— _Liam_ —the others that he’d found you. In hindsight, you’re just surprised that it took this long.

But Liam’s expression just twists. “Argent didn’t tell me,” he denies, like he’s reading your mind. You glance up at him, brow furrowing. Liam looks sharply, _viciously_ satisfied. “I smelled you on him a few days ago. I figured out where he‘d been.”

 _Oh_ , you think. _Argent did tell you, then_ , you realize, but don’t say; it’d be impossible to prove, anyway, and you and Liam have enough to fight over without adding this to the pile. You stay wedged into the corner that Liam had pinned you into. You look at him. You wait.

That’s apparently not the response Liam wants. His expression twists. “You seriously don’t have _anything_ to say to me?” He demands.

You wince. Nausea is starting to rise like floodwaters back into your veins, once more filling the hollowed-out space that Liam had pulled it away from. For a brief, blinding, _desperate_ moment you want to ask Liam to put his fingers back on your neck; to pull it away again.

You say nothing.

“I can’t fucking _believe_ you!” Liam shouts, and wheels away; too much for his body, apparently; too much for the corner he’d wedged you, and himself, into.

It gives you enough room to slip out of the corner; a crack to slip _through_. You take it.

\---

Unsurprisingly, Liam follows you down the hallway, towards your bedroom.

He’s still yelling vitriol but he stops when he sees your bare mattress lying on the floor, covered in your ragged collection of blankets. You force yourself to keep walking, to not look back; to not check what expression is on Liam’s face, and whether or not you can read it. Instead you just pull your ruined, wet-and-bloody shirt over your head, and toss it aside as you dig through the single duffel bag sitting on the ground for a new one.

Behind you, Liam sucks in a sharp breath. You’d be flattered if you couldn’t smell—your burned-out senses filtering back in, the steady rasp of sea-salt fading—the sudden ashy tinge to his scent; surprise, and horror. You just pull your new shirt over your head; you know how stark your ribs are. You don’t need to look.

When you turn around to look at Liam instead, you find that you _can_ read his new expression. You almost wish you couldn’t.

“What happened to you?” He wonders, hushed like a prayer.

You quirk him a shadow of one of your old smirks. “I happened to me,” you reply.

\---

Whatever Liam was expecting to find when he hunted you down, it’s clearly different than what he actually finds.

It leaves him off-footed and awkward. It doesn’t help that you don’t have any furniture in your apartment beyond your bare mattress, since there’s nowhere to sit, or go. You’d led him back out of your bedroom because you knew he’d follow you—though he probably hadn’t realized that that’s what you’d been doing—and out into the living area, but even there, there’s nothing for you to do but stare at each other across the stretch of stained carpet. Liam bites his lip hard enough to puncture it.

You have to bring the back of your hand up to cover your mouth as the sudden sting of blood in the air makes you gag.

“Sorry,” Liam says automatically, his eyes fixed on your face and the shape of his brow distressed. He licks the blood away, tongue careful and pink and probing, until it’s gone.

You can’t help but stare at him, eyes helplessly crinkling over the press of the back of your hand against your mouth as you think: _fucking Liam_.

Can’t even be angry with someone right.

Can’t interrogate someone right, either. If he were you, or you were him, you’d keep standing exactly like he is, feet planted strongly and _waiting_. But Liam isn’t you— _thank god_ , some corner of your mind thinks: _thank god_ —and so he cracks under the weight of his own twisted-up expression, and shuffling feet, and the desperate way he keeps opening his mouth and closing it again, over and over, until finally he blurts out:

“Why’d you run?”

You wince. “Do you actually need me to answer that?” You ask him, and the thing is: you _mean it_.

If he says yes, you’ll tell him.

But Liam apparently thinks you’re being harsh, sarcastic; the person he knew back in Beacon Hills. He flinches. “No,” he decides, quietly.

It’s honestly worse than the alternative.

\---

When his stomach rumbles, and he blushes furiously, you take him to the diner.

The waitress of the small-scale tragedy looks pleased when she spots him, her eyes lingering on his face. Better than Argent’s, she must be thinking; mistaking Liam for a friend. She sits you in a booth situated right by the windows, with a wealth of natural light. It puts your back to the TV hung in the corner of the bar, though you can still hear it rumbling low at the edge of your hearing; like a train running over tracks; steady, steady, steady.

“What’ll you have?” She asks, cheerful and with her pencil posed over her notepad.

You open your mouth to say _black coffee_. You won’t be able to stomach anything else.

“Burgers,” Liam answers before you can. His eyes are on your face, not the waitress. “Two of ‘em. Cheese, bacon, fries, the works.” Only then does he glance up and smile at her, wide and winning. It doesn’t touch his eyes, but she can’t know enough to recognize that.

“Liam,” you try, after she’s grinned a smile that _does_ touch her eyes, and walked away.

“Shut up,” he snaps.

He doesn’t speak to you for the whole time it takes your food to come out. Instead he spends the time unrolling his little bundle of silverware, and lining it up perpendicular to the table’s edge in precise, neat rows. The napkin frustrates him with how it won’t stay folded, curling forever up into the shape it’d been pressed into before he’d freed it, and after a while he gives up, and throws it down, and covers his face with his hands.

It knocks his knife askew from the rest of his silverware. You have to stifle the absurd urge to nudge it back into place.

When your waitress comes back her cheeriness has dimmed, some; she’d been watching your table instead of the TV hung over the bar, and her concern is writ soft across her face. You wonder what sort of story she’s concocted for you in her head, this boy who only drinks black coffee, this boy too thin, always alone or accompanied by a strange, neutral-faced man or now this other boy, with his silverware lined up like his best intentions and knocked just as askew by circumstance; by reality; by you. You try to smile at her because it’s expected, because it’s what you would have done before.

It doesn’t work. She sets your plates down. She gives you a long, searching look.

She goes away again, when you do nothing but look back.

You wind up reaching for your plate just to have something to do with your hands. Liam still hasn’t spoken to you and so you’re not expecting it when he catches your wrist halfway across the table, and tightens his fingers when you jerk, reflexively, and go to pull it back.

Black lines start snaking up his wrist. You stare at him as the nausea fades; as he _pulls it_ away again, his eyes fixed on your face and his mouth a tight line.

He drops your wrist, and your eyes, after. He picks up his burger.

\---

And you? Well—you wind up _wolfing_ down your food.

If you were anything other than what you are—if you were _human_ —you’d be making yourself sick, your body no longer used to such rich meals and certainly not so _much_. But freed from your nausea again your body’s healing, or survival instincts, or _whatever_ , kick in, and you _eat_.

You’d be embarrassed, you think, if _shame_ was still something you were capable of feeling. If _pride_ was. As it is Liam’s eyes on your face, that unreadable look back on his, barely registers.

You’ve never been so grateful to be _hungry_ before.

But eventually you clean your plate. But eventually the nausea starts filtering back in.

Liam must be able to tell, somehow; your scent, maybe. He starts to reach for your wrist at the same time that he starts to turn his head, clearly about to wave your waitress over; about to order more on your behalf. You retract your hand just enough that he grasps empty air instead, and shake your head slightly when he jerks and looks at you strangely.

He frowns, but after a moment he lets it go. His plate is still three-quarters full as he asks—your waitress having noticed the attention no matter Liam’s aborted original plan—for the check.

She brings a to-go box over when she brings it, though neither you nor Liam had asked for it. Liam grins at her, and spends the time it takes her to go run the card he hands over loading up his abandoned burger—dumping the fries over the top—into the box.

You don’t argue, no matter how challenging a look Liam gives you from across the table.

Back at your apartment he shoves the box into your near-empty fridge. You stand by the front door, and wait.

Liam just grits his teeth. He slams the fridge door shut. “Do you know how long it took me to drive up here?” He demands. _Twelve hours_ , you think. “Twelve hours,” he snaps. “I can’t drive back tonight.”

“I know,” you say, because you do; you had.

\---

But, the problem, once again: your lack of furniture.

The easiest solution would be for you to retreat back to your truck, and leave your bare mattress with its pile of blankets to Liam. But even if you could bring yourself to do it, which you _can’t_ —dread and desperation and a sickening sort of despair immediately washing over you at just the _thought_ —you don’t think Liam would let you.

He hasn’t allowed himself to be more than ten feet from you since you had arrived back at your apartment and had found him there, waiting. You don’t think it’s an accident.

But the stalemate leaves the two of you standing in your bedroom, Liam mule-mouthed and you a pale-faced sort of exhausted, both generally and specifically, and eventually you default to the only solution you can think of; you start stripping your clothes over your head, mechanically and fast enough that by the time Liam sucks in a breath to protest, you’re already shivering loose of your skin.

You trot your way over to a corner of the room. You curl up in a tight spiral, your muzzle tucked up against your hind legs and your tail over your nose.

You watch Liam as he watches you, the skin around his eyes and the shape of his mouth gone soft.

He climbs into your bed, eventually, still wearing the clothes he’d arrived in. At first he lies down with his back to you but almost immediately he turns completely around so that he’s facing you, instead.

You spend a long time like that, his eyes on your eyes on his.

But eventually his eyelids flutter shut, and he sleeps. And so, after a while, do you.

But you wake up with a jolt some time later. At first you think it’s your own racing heartbeat and panting, ragged breaths that woke you, but then you realize: you’re no longer used to hearing others so close to you. You’re hearing _Liam’s_ heartbeat and bellows-like lungs and mistaking them for your own.

Mistaking his fear-sour scent for your own.

You hesitate, for another few long, dragging seconds, and then you climb up onto your four paws. The room is small enough that padding over to him is the work of a moment, maybe four total steps of your big, lupine body. You stop at the edge of the mattress lying on the floor, and peer down at him.

His eyes are screwed tightly shut. He’s shaking with slight tremors. His fingers are wound so tightly in the blankets he’d pulled up almost to his chin that they’re bloodless; you nose at them, before you can smother the instinct, the urge.

Liam jolts at the touch of the wet tip of your nose to his skin, but doesn’t wake. His fingers relax around the blankets.

You hesitate again, and then you slowly fold yourself down so that you’re lying next to the mattress, your head and muzzle resting on the mattress itself, right next to Liam’s hand.

Your breath skates over his skin as you breathe, in, out. His shaking stops. His expression relaxes.

His fingers stretch out, unconsciously seeking, and brush the tip of your nose, the side of your muzzle.

You close your eyes, and stay very still.

\---

You wake up slow the next morning, sweating and over-warm.

The reason why becomes clear soon enough: Liam had migrated over to the edge of the mattress some time in the night, and is pressed up against your side where it meets the mattress, one of his arms looped around your front legs and his fingers woven tightly in the fur of your chest.

You freeze, when you realize this. You stay as still as possible; barely breathing.

It’s why you can tell the exact moment that he wakes up. He huffs out a gust of air that ruffles the fur of the back of your neck, and his fingers spasm where they’re still tangled in the fur of your chest. But he freezes, just like you had, the second he seems to realize how you two are situated; he goes just as still.

He pretends, as far as you can tell, to still be asleep.

You let him, your thoughts still feeling sluggish and slow and animalistic besides, your lupine brain registering the warmth first and the comfort of Liam’s heavy arm around you second and everything else _later_. If he moves, you decide, you’ll move.

But he doesn’t move, so you don’t move. Eventually you fall back asleep.

When you wake up again, you’re no longer sweating or over-warm, and your thoughts aren’t slow. You raise your head, and look at Liam, sat up against the wall with the blankets draped over his lap and that unreadable look back on his face. He’s been watching you, clearly. You wonder for how long.

“Change back,” he orders, firm and unyielding, like there’s no chance at all you’ll argue.

He doesn’t look away, even when your fur retreats back into your skin, and you wind up crouched on all fours, naked. He does kick a blanket towards you; an offering. You take it. You wind it around your bare waist as you swallow, and turn—the room that cramped—so that you can drag your duffel full of clothes toward yourself, and start pulling out things to wear.

There’s nothing sexual in the attention. His eyes are on your ribs, not your cock, or your ass, or any other part of you. The look on his face stays unreadable, but his scent isn’t; you have to swallow again, this time around a reflexive mouthful of saliva.

“Come on,” he says, getting to his feet; another order. He doesn’t bother to wait to see if you’re following.

Out in your kitchen he pulls his leftover burger from the diner out, and doesn’t bother looking around for a plate; he just pops the lid off the plastic container, and slides the rest into the microwave. You stand at the edge of the tile, your bare toes curling against the place where the carpet ends, and watch.

The microwave dings, and Liam pulls the reheated container out. He extends both arms: one hand offering the food, the other empty. You flick your eyes up to meet his from where yours had fallen automatically to look at the burger, your stomach already turning; your gut already rolling with nausea. You work a jaw connected to a mouth that tastes like blood and grave dirt.

You remember, briefly, what it’d felt like to be _hungry_.

You give him your wrist.

Only once he’s siphoned your nausea does he finish shoving the reheated container against your chest. A new kind of guilt curls in your chest as you eat, and he doesn’t, but the look on his face isn’t unreadable, anymore; it’s a warning. You let it go.

Things that he doesn’t let go:

“Why’d you run?” He demands, after you’ve finished every bite and set the now-empty container very carefully aside.

Your brow furrows. With your actual eyes you see Liam, rigid with tension in the middle of your rundown kitchen, but in your mind’s eye you see Tracy, Josh, Tara. “I thought we—” you start to say.

“That wasn’t the only reason,” he interrupts, a denial, then: “Was it?”

“...no,” you say, after a moment.

\---

Here is the calculus that’d played out in your head:

Crouched over Gabe’s body and still feeling shaky with the surreal sensation of someone else’s pain flowing through your veins, you’d felt Ms. McCall’s and Nolan’s and Mason’s and Corey’s eyes on your back, but mostly you’d felt Liam’s. And you’d thought, _Liam knows what it’s like to make mistakes_. He’d made a very specific Scott-shaped mistake that one time, but that was just—the extreme. He’d made lots of others.

He’d made lots of others and he’d been forgiven for them, and that had been where the sticking point was going to be, you’d realized, because Liam is, at heart, a genuinely good person, with a strict sense of right and wrong, and a stubborn sense of balance, of equality. Liam had made lots of mistakes and been forgiven for them, and so he’d—graft that same process onto others.

He’d graft it onto you.

And maybe that was admirable and maybe it was naive, but at the end of the day what it meant was that Liam would be— _I will fight with you_ —the only one in your corner. He’d _put_ himself in your corner already, both literally and figuratively, in the elevator before the fight at the hospital, even if he hadn’t realized that’s what he was doing, and he’d stay there, because he was loyal and stubborn and would convince himself that he’d made some kind of deal, sealed some kind of pact.

It could have meant a lot of things, but what it boiled down to was that if you stayed, Liam would spend the foreseeable future—however long that stretched out, whether something changed, or didn’t—apologizing for you.

And you weren’t sorry. Or you _were_ , you _are_ , but that’s—well. What is it? Being sorry isn’t going to dig Tara out of the ground with her heart back in her chest. It isn’t going to bring Josh or Tracy or any of the Doctors’ or Beast’s victims back. In the hospital with Gabe or now, there had been and remains _nothing_ you can do to change any of it.

And it’s not _fatalism_ , or giving up, or whatever. It’s not self-pity. It’s—you look at Liam across from you, his mouth hard but this clear question in his eyes, and you try to line up the words in your head. But all you can think is, _it’d be disrespectful_.

It sounds so trite, and absurd, but. You killed Josh and Tracy of your own free will, for your own reasons—even if, you can now admit in hindsight, those reasons had been _pathetic_ —and trying to pretend there’s a road back from all that is just—laughable. And maybe Tara had been different—maybe you’d been _nine years old_ —but she’s still dead and you’re still alive, and.

And, well.

And, well. God, hadn’t you already done enough to them? To them and the Doctors’ and the Beast’s victims? Adding on some doomed redemption quest had just seemed like going too far, even for you.

You’d done a lot of things in your life, most of them terrible, but you’d found that you couldn’t do that to them.

\---

You’d found, oddly, that you couldn’t do it to yourself, either.

\---

You say, precisely, exactly none of this to Liam.

He gets this look on his face like he hears it anyway. He looks away from you. His expression shifts, changes, until the exact moment that it settles; you recognize it.

It’s exactly how it’d looked in that elevator when he’d said: _but I will fight with you._

Putting himself back into your corner; settling in.

“Are you going to run again?” He asks, finally. He looks back up at you.

You think about it; you consider. You picture it in your mind: packing up your truck, and your duffel bag full of clothes, and the permanent taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth. Argent had said, _I can find you again_. He’d said, _I_ will _find you again, if you run._ Both of those things were probably true, but there are cracks in everything—even Argent, and his hunting, and _himself_ —and you’re you: your whole life has been slipping through cracks. You could probably do it again.

But:

“No,” you decide.

\---

All told, Liam’s visit lasts just under twenty-four hours, and you say barely more than twice that many words to each other from the time he first breaks into your apartment until the time he walks out of it again.

It doesn’t seem to matter.

What matters:

 _Are you going to leave again?_ Liam had asked, and you’d said, _no_.

\---

So this is how it goes: sometimes Argent shows up, and sometimes Liam does, and the two never intersect.

That’s Argent’s doing, of course, not Liam’s. He must be tracking Liam the same way he’s tracking you; the same way he must track everyone, really. You wonder if it’s habit or compulsion or some strange mix of both, and think it’s probably—just what it is: Argent the last survivor, left standing in his circle of graves.

You force down another mouthful of gyro, tasting nothing but grave dirt and blood, and as you do it you force yourself to stop thinking about Argent beside you. Argent, the last of his name.

Around you the docks keep buzzing. Argent had come to retrieve you from work because there’d been a development; Monroe zigging when everyone had expected her to zag. It says something about you that Argent comes to you to get inside Monroe’s head. It’s a two-fold piece of knowledge, this twisted-up contradiction: on the one hand, your ability to do it—and you _can_ do it—would make you sick to your stomach, if you weren’t already _always_ sick to your stomach.

But on the other hand:

“Here,” you say, and tap at a place on a paper map that Argent had spread out between you. “She’ll send her people here.”

Forty-eight hours and a single text message prove you right.

On the other hand: you were made, literally, to be a tool. It feels good to be used again.

It feels good to be _of use_ again.

\---

Eventually you take Liam to the sea.

He never warns you that he’s coming; he just appears. He doesn’t break into your apartment again after that first time, though, which is nice if only because you don’t have to replace the locks, and the wood of the jamb, again. Instead he’ll wait in the hallway, or the lobby, or—one time—your truck, which he must have tracked from your complex to the docks. That time you’d found him laid back in the bed one day after a long shift, your sense of smell burned out and so the sight of him a complete surprise, his legs dangling over the lowered tailgate and his hands folded loosely over his chest.

After a moment’s hesitation, you’d hopped up next to him, and then laid back, too. The two of you had ended up staying there for _hours_ , just like that.

But the day you take him to the sea, is the day he shows up early in the morning, rather than the afternoon, or night. You realize instantly that it means he’d driven all night, and you want to ask, you _do_ , but instead you step out of your doorway so he can come inside. He’s holding a drink carrier with two coffee cups in his hands, a white paper bag of breakfast sandwiches perched on top of the lids, and this time when he takes hold of your wrist to siphon your nausea he doesn’t let it go, right away, when he’s done.

The coffee he hands you is some overdone, over-sugared affair. You take it. You rasp, “Thanks.”

You eat shoulder to shoulder, sitting against the cabinets in your kitchen because you still don’t have any furniture. Liam’s the one who sits first. His thigh is very warm against yours when you sit second.

You want to ask. You don’t.

Usually Liam shows up late enough that the rest of the night suggests itself: a trip to the diner, or the little hole-in-the-wall Peruvian place, or the little stand near the gas station by the highway that sells still-steaming _pelmeni_ , Liam’s hand around your wrist and his eyes on your face, and then back to the apartment to sleep, Liam in your bed and you in your wolf-form, curled up by the edge of the mattress. It’s not an accident; Liam knows how long the drive is. He knows precisely when he’ll arrive, each and every time.

But the day you take him to the sea, is the day he shows up early in the morning.

You’ve just finished eating your sandwich, and drinking your overdone, over-sugared coffee, when Liam tips his head—his shoulder still warm, warm, against yours—and asks, “So what is it you do when you’re not working?”

It’s a cool morning; brisk. It’ll be _baking_ later in the day, when the sun finishes rising, but for now the breeze off the water is biting, and as sharp as the salt in the air. You stop at the edge of the sand, and drop, and ignoring the stunned, startled look on Liam’s face, you begin unlacing your boots; tucking your socks inside them.

“Come on,” you say, when you’re done. You _do_ wait to see if he’s following, before you step out onto the beach.

It takes a moment; Liam has to duck down, and pull off his own shoes, and socks. But he lines them up next to yours, and when he moves to follow you one of his footsteps overlaps with yours. It stays, frozen in the damp sand; a cast, a mold, for however long it takes the tide to rise.

The beach is flecked with little long-beaked birds. They scatter when you approach. You feel saliva reflexively coat your mouth as you watch them, and the shift slouch under your skin. _I used to eat those_ , you think of telling Liam. _I used to eat those so I wouldn’t starve._

You don’t. But you think you might, one day.

Instead you walk to the very edge of the sea. It retreats as you approach. It rushes back in as Liam reaches you. The water flows over your feet as he comes to stand next to you, shoulder-to-shoulder, sinking you both down a little deeper into the sand.

Liam keeps his eyes on the horizon. You keep your eyes on Liam.

After a while, he looks at you instead of the sea. “I can see why you like it here,” he says, but it’s not what you think he _means_.

\---

What you think he means: _he_ likes it here.

\---

You stay on the beach long enough that if either of you were human, you’d both be bright-red, blistered; sun-burned. As it is none of those things happen. Your healing and his kicks in, and stays kicked in, and you don’t even tan. You stay the same, he stays the same.

The both of you, together, stay the same.

But you do sweat in the heat that—you’d been right—does turn out to be _baking_. So eventually you both stand, dehydrated and with chapped lips that even your healing can’t erase, and wander down the beach, towards the sounds of people and noise. You don’t realize that you’re walking in Liam’s footsteps for a long while.

You don’t stop, even once you do.

Liam finds a food truck on the edge of the beach, and pays for two bottles of imported Mexican cola and all the _carne asada_ the vendor has. The beach is packed with people and so Liam leads you away from the sand and back to the street behind it, where he sits on the curb and starts spreading out his meal next to him. You sink down next to him without thinking, and do the same.

He doesn’t ask before taking your arm, and siphoning your nausea; he just does it. You don’t thank him, but you do close your eyes when you take the first bite of your food, and when you open them back up again he’s watching you. You look back. He releases your wrist, but spreads his bent legs a little wider, so that his thigh is pressing up against yours.

You’d left your shoes way back by the stretch of beach by the barbed-wire-topped fence, and so after you eat you walk back there. It’s afternoon by the time you reach it, and you wonder what Liam will do. It’s too late to go back to Beacon Hills, probably, but then again it’d been too late to _leave_ Beacon Hills when he must have last night. You’re still caught up in the circular nature of your thoughts when Liam drops right back down by the edge of the water.

He goes back to watching the horizon, and after a while you go back to watching him.

\---

You get back to your apartment late.

You’re both crusted with sand and sea-salt, and so you both need to rinse off. You let Liam go first, and spend the time he’s in the shower trying not to imagine him in it, which of course means that’s exactly what you _do_. Sat on the floor with your back to your kitchen cabinets—the safest place for you to be, considering you’re still shedding sand with every more—you close your eyes, and tip your head back, and listen to the sound of the water hitting, alternatively, the porcelain of the bathtub and Liam’s skin.

You fall asleep just like that, sun-exhausted and just generally exhausted, and you only jerk awake when Liam taps a bare foot against your hip. You look up at him. Even before that, you’re breathing in, and that’s why you realize even before you recognize the shirt hanging off his chest or the sweatpants riding low on his hips that he’s wearing your clothes. “My stuff was full of sand,” he offers, when he notices you looking. He shrugs.

“Okay,” you say, for lack of anything else. All the other potential options seem dangerous, suddenly, as does your proximity. You scramble to your feet. You edge past Liam towards the bathroom.

You feel his eyes on your back the whole time you’re walking to it.

You have to use the same towel that Liam did after you shower because you’ve only ever owned one. It’s another in a long line of your decisions that suddenly seems questionable, and it doesn’t become less so when you’re scrubbing the towel over your face to dry it, and catch a mouthful of his scent and yours combined. You freeze, which you hadn’t meant to do, and breathe it in a second time, a third.

You don’t get a fourth; you set the towel down on the counter, very deliberately, and leave it there.

You hadn’t bothered bringing a change of clothes into the bathroom because you hadn’t anticipated needing one. Both you and Liam are exhausted from the sun and the heat and everything else you’d brought with you to the beach—whatever drove him to get in his car and drive twelve hours overnight to come see you; each other; yourselves—and you’d both wordlessly planned to go straight to sleep. Instead you leave your dirty clothes in a pile, and prepare to shift so that you can go curl up next to your mattress in your wolf form.

But before you can, the door—left cracked so your four-legged self could eel through it—opens. You startle and barely manage to swipe the towel off the counter and position it in between your legs, blocking the sight of your soft cock. But Liam doesn’t even bother looking down. His eyes stay on your face. There’s a plain white shirt and another pair of sweatpants in his hands. He tosses them to you.

You’re still off-balanced enough from Liam’s sudden entry into the bathroom that you reflexively drop the towel to catch the clothes. Liam’s eyes still don’t flicker down between your legs, no matter the fact that he _could_ see, now, if he wanted.

No matter that you’re not sure whether or not you’d _want_ him to see.

Instead, he just says, “Your mattress is big enough for two. C’mon,” and jerks his chin back towards your bedroom.

You hesitate. You swallow. You finger the weave of the cotton in your hands.

You get dressed.

Liam lies down first, on his side and facing away from you. You lower yourself slowly down after, still unsure. First one knee, then another. A hand to brace yourself, and then another to lift one of the blankets carefully up, so that you can slide underneath it. The muscles of Liam’s back stiffen as you do but he doesn’t say anything, so you don’t either.

You turn onto your side, too, away from him. You close your eyes.

\---

You wake up the next morning with Liam wrapped around you, one leg anchored over your hips and his arm looped over your waist. His nose is buried in the back of your neck, and he’s breathing slow, and even.

You close your eyes. You go back to sleep.

\---

The next time Argent comes to see you, he wants to go to the diner.

“I like the coffee,” he answers, though you hadn’t actually asked. His tongue is firmly in his cheek, and—surprising yourself—your lips flicker in a barely-there smile in response.

You go to the diner.

You don’t talk, really, but that’s not unusual. Argent gets his cup of coffee and so do you, but where Argent would normally order for you—the waitress looking automatically and expectantly at him—he doesn’t. Instead he sits, one arm draped over the back of the booth seat behind himself, and raises his eyebrows at you over the rim of his coffee cup. Your mouth drops open in surprise. You barely manage to turn it into speech.

“Eggs,” you say. “Toast.” The blandness of the food wouldn’t exactly change the taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth, but it’d help with the nausea.

You miss, suddenly and fiercely, Liam.

The waitress leaves, looking softly pleased with the unexpected turn of events, and you look at Argent. He’s watching you right back, steady, steady, steady. You have the sudden certain impression that he _knows_ what you’d just thought about Liam, somehow; he’d seen it on your face, maybe. You frown.

You ask, before you can stop yourself: “Why did you tell Liam where I was?”

Argent doesn’t even try to deny it. He takes another long drink of his coffee and then lowers his cup, swirling the remainder around briefly before bringing it back up to his mouth, and taking another drink. When he sets it down on the table with a _click_ it rings hollow; empty. His eyes flick over your face, your arms, your chest. At first you’re not sure what he’s doing, and then you realize: he’d been looking at your _cheeks_ , no longer so hollow. He’d been looking at your _biceps_ , the bulge of muscle returned. He’d been looking at your _ribs_ , the suggestion of them under your shirt no longer so stark.

He flicks his eyes back up to yours. He answers, “For his sake as much as yours.”

\---

That night as you’re going to bed, you realize that you can still smell just the faintest trace of Liam on your blankets; on the pillow below your head. You press your fingers to your side, over your shirt, looking for your ribs. You find them, but it takes effort. You count them anyway, one by one, your face turned into the cotton so that you’re inhaling Liam’s scent on every breath.

 _For his sake as much as yours,_ Argent had said. You wonder, and wonder, and wonder.

\---

Nearly three-quarters of a year after you’d fled Beacon Hills, and a little over six months from the first time he’d done it, Argent breaks into your apartment again.

He doesn’t greet you with a gun pressed up against your kidney this time. He doesn’t greet you, at all. Instead, when you unlock your door after a long day at the docks, your sense of smell burned out by the sea-salt air, he’s there, sat against the far wall on the carpet—you still don’t have any furniture—with his legs outstretched, his body one loose-limbed _slump_.

You stop, and stare, still stood framed in your doorway; you’ve never seen him so easy, or relaxed. He grins at you, slow and lazy. He salutes you with the open, sweating bottle of beer in his hand. It’s only then that you notice the six pack next to his hip. One of the bottles in the container is topless; already drunk.

You step inside, carefully, and shut the door behind yourself. After another few seconds of hesitation, you pick your way over to him and fold yourself down, a few feet away from his outstretched legs.

Argent rolls his head sideways against the wall to follow your progress. He says, “Monroe is dead.”

You can feel the way your expression blanks with surprise, your mouth dropping softly open. Argent seems to find that funny; he laughs, quietly and under his breath. He rolls his head back forwards so that he’s no longer looking at you, and takes another long drink.

You don’t know what to say. You don’t think you’re _supposed_ to say anything, actually; you not saying anything might, in fact, be the reason that Argent is here. So after a while you just shift so that you’re sitting with your back to the wall that runs perpendicular to the one Argent is against. You don’t stretch out your legs, but keep them bent in close to your chest, though you do let them sprawl at an angle, your elbows dangling over your knees. You tip your head back, and close your eyes, and listen to the off-rhythm sounds of yours and Argent’s hearts beating, nowhere close to synchronized. You listen to the steady sounds of his throat as he works his way through his beer.

You don’t open your eyes until Argent says, “Hey,” and taps one of his feet against the side of one of yours. Your eyelids flutter open. He asks, “Want to see a trick?”

With Argent a trick could probably mean a lot of things, many of them deadly, but apparently what it means in this case is Argent reaching for one of the four remaining beers, and popping the top off, and then retrieving a slim black case from his pocket. When he opens it up, you startle backwards slightly, the smell sharp; sharper even than the sea-salt air of the beach. You stare at the little purple flowers revealed, and then flick your eyes up to Argent.

He just smiles, small and loose and easy, and plucks two off of the stem, and drops them into the beer he’d opened. He swirls the bottle around so that the leaves of the plant become saturated, and sink to the bottom, and then he holds it out.

You hesitate, but if Argent had wanted to kill you, he could have already killed you in a hundred different ways, at a hundred different times. You take the bottle. You take a drink.

If the effect of wolfsbane-laced alcohol is an accurate mimic of _actual_ alcohol, you’ll never know: you were nine when you were taken by the Doctors. Still, you find the slump of your own shoulders getting easier as you work your way through the bottle; your legs start to sprawl out more loosely, your head starts to roll a little more on your neck. You drink your first beer as he drinks his third, and still you don’t talk.

You accept the second bottle, when he offers it out, two more flowers plucked off the stem from the case that he leaves open between you on the ground. You work your way through it as he works his way through his fourth.

It’s late, by the time you finish. Your thoughts have gone slow, muzzy; soft-edged. You think you could fall asleep where you sit, your first bottle of beer set carefully by your hip and your second lined up just as carefully next to it.

But suddenly Argent says, “The phone I gave you, give it to me.”

When you look up, he’s holding out a hand. For all that he drank double you did his eyes are perfectly sharp, and his fingers are perfectly steady. You are neither of those things; it takes you a few fumbling tries to wrestle the phone out of your pocket, and you knock over both of your beer bottles as you do. It seems critically important that you fix them, and so after you slap the phone into Argent’s waiting palm, you lean back over to grab at them, and stand them precisely up, one at a time.

It’s why you hear it, instead of see it, when something snaps. You whip your head back around. You stare at the broken halves of the phone’s SIM card, grasped between the fingers of Argent’s hands. Your eyes flick up to Argent’s and he smirks.

He drops one half into one of his empty beer bottles, slotted back into their original places in the container, and drops the other half into a second. He tosses the phone back to you, after. You nearly fumble it.

He stands.

As you watch, staring up at him still cradling the phone against your chest, he touches the tip of one finger to his nose, and then the other. After that he walks a careful tightrope-line over to the container of empty beer bottles sitting on the ground, and picks it up. It’s only after he fishes his keys from his pocket with his other hand that you realize what he’d been doing; his own version of a field sobriety test. You keep staring up at him, your thoughts still slow and muzzy and soft-edged.

Argent watches you for a little longer, and then he says, “Goodbye, Theo,” his voice soft.

He leaves, then, the little cardboard container of empty beer bottles in one hand, and his keys in the other. He shuts your door carefully behind himself, turning the knob so that it closes silently, and releasing it so it latches just as silently, too.

You sit and stare after him. You sit and stare after him for a long time.

\---

You’re pretty sure you wake up the next morning with a hangover, in effect if not in name.

Your head pounds with a headache that your healing doesn’t erase and your mouth tastes dry, and cottony. That you’re not any more or less nauseous than normal is probably the one saving grace of you _always_ being nauseous. Still, you spend a while laying in bed after you first wake up feeling decidedly sorry for yourself.

Sorry enough that you give up on even pretending to be productive for the day, and you go to the beach. Once there you shed your clothes in the trees bordering the shoreline, and go curl up on the sand in your full-shift form, close enough to the barbed-wire-tipped fence that no one is likely to stumble on you. You lie close enough to the water that you can smell it sharp and salty and stinging in your nose when it rushes in over the sand, but far enough away that it doesn’t reach you. At various points you have to get up, and stagger closer as the tide retreats.

You’re not sure how long you lie there before you hear rustling in the trees. Your head snaps up and twists around, panic filling your mind; wolves aren’t native to this part of the country, after all, and they certainly aren’t native to this _beach._ But almost immediately you relax. More than that: you climb to your feet, and start towards the tree line.

You meet Liam just as he’s about to break it. He grins when he sees you, and holds out his hands, and you don’t even think twice about pressing your head into them. His fingers card back through the short fur on either side of your muzzle and then down into the longer fur covering your neck and you shiver, and twist your head to get closer, all but pressing in against his legs. Liam just ends up going to his knees and turning his face into your side as you hook your head over his shoulder, your forelegs against his chest. For the space of three, four, five long breaths he stays like that, and then he pulls back.

“Your clothes around here somewhere?” He asks quietly, he fingers carding absently through your fur. “It’s okay if not,” he adds, with a small quirked grin, “but I wouldn’t mind seeing your face.”

You nudge your nose against his cheek, and then pull away to go trot over to your clothes and change, both figuratively and literally.

When you come back, human-shaped and dressed, Liam is standing on the edge of the water. He’d shed his shoes and socks when you were changing, and you spend a second watching the surf flow over and around his bare toes as you come to stand next to him, and then you flick your eyes up to his face. He catches you looking, and he looks right back.

“Monroe’s dead,” he says. There’s no particular inflection in his voice and no particular expression on his face, but his scent’s a mess. You deliberately don’t try picking it apart; he’d tell you, or he wouldn’t.

Instead you answer, quiet and rasping because your body is still remembering _this_ shape rather than _that_ shape: “I know.”

Liam looks confused for a second before realizing: “Argent.”

He nods, apparently to himself, and glances back at the water. You realize in turn—the calculations spooling absently out in your head—that he and Argent must have passed each other, coming and going. It gives you this weird jolting feeling, not quite like grinding gears but _something_ ; world’s colliding.

You’re still mulling it over when Liam turns back to you. His eyes are dark, even with the high angle of the sun. There’s something braced to the way he’s holding himself, his feet planted and his spine straight, though not stiff. In front of you the waves keep crashing along the shore, swelling and then retreating.

He says, “You should come home.”

You look at him. “I don’t have a home,” you tell him quietly, and without bitterness.

It’s just a fact.

But Liam just cocks his head. His eyes narrow just slightly. His expression becomes more shrewd. He asks, “Do you want one?”

You consider it, but.

“I want you,” you admit, too honest; your throat feels raw with it. Liam’s mouth drops open. He _stares_.

You’re standing close, again. Close enough that when Liam suddenly surges into you, his momentum knocks you both back a step. You barely notice, just automatically shift your weight to compensate, and keep you both on your feet, your mind entirely fixed on the press of his lips to yours; of his hands sliding into your hair to anchor himself to you as he kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you.

But he pulls back, finally. He reaches down and takes hold of one of your hands, and brings it up to flatten it just slightly off-center of his own chest as he gasps out, out of breath but _firm_ : “Then you should _come home_.”

His palm flattens even harder against your own, so that you feel his heart beating even more strongly against your flesh. When he says _home_ you understand that he’s not talking about Beacon Hills. You search his eyes, for a long few moments. Your fingers spasm against his chest, digging in.

You nod.

\---

You arrive in Los Angeles with exactly the same things you left Beacon Hills with: your truck, a duffel bag full of clothes, and the permanent taste of blood and grave dirt in your mouth.

The beaches of the city are lined with piers. When you arrive at the address you’d been sent, picking your way carefully down the walk through the seemingly omnipresent crowds, Liam is already there. He’d claimed what seems to be the last free feet of space along the edge of the pier itself, his legs dangling over the side and his knees spread wide. But when he looks up—having seen or heard or smelled you coming—he brings them closer together, making room. He grins.

When you lower yourself down next to him, the edge of your bracing hand brushes his. It could have been an accident, but it isn’t; it hadn’t been.

Once seated you inhale as subtly as you can. There are competing smells pressing in from all around you, nearly overpowering, but you have _practice_ picking Liam’s out; you have motivation. You find it, underneath the smell of smog and crammed-close humanity and the bite of the sea; he smells like himself, and Mason and Corey, and the very real and very pungent reek of a freshman dorm. Your nose wrinkles.

Liam catches it. “Try being me actually _living_ in the middle of it,” he points out dryly, unimpressed.

You just smirk, and look away. Your hands are still touching.

But you can’t look away for long. Liam reaches over with his other hand, and cups the side of your face. He turns it back towards himself, and kisses you, slow and lingering and sweet. The bustle of the pier continues on around you, unbroken, matched by the sound of the sea.

Liam pulls back, after a while. He meets your eyes, and one corner of his mouth curls up in a soft, easy smile.

He says, “Welcome home.”

\---

Mouth full of dirt and blood

Mind racing with _memories_

Trying to let go

Be sinless

To _sin_ less.

The _ocean_ ’s salt erases

What the mind can not

Broken boys and broken phones

Still to be found

By the right _home_.

Art and Poem by [LI0NH34RT](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LI0NH34RT)

\---

Art by [ArtZeppo](https://artzeppo.tumblr.com/)

\---

Art by [Artzeppo](https://artzeppo.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> Theo suffers from Phantageusia, or (as I understand it) Phantom Taste Syndrome. He tastes blood and grave dirt in his mouth pretty much constantly.
> 
> All feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/624723040197050368/trade-the-hollow-in-my-chest-for-all-the-salt-in)!


End file.
